Hi All!
It’s February, the time of the year that can stall even the most stalwart of engines. But the birds in Brooklyn today are loudening up the clouds with one of those hopeless song explosions they do now and again, with everybody chirping and nobody listening. To be alive today is to be chirping or not chirping, listening or not listening, it’s unusual to just “be” without reference to the interwebs one way or another. What are we all saying? What is the chirping about? Life is a musical but we are all playing the lead and we all have our own “I want” song. You know the idea that in musicals the lead roles each begin with an “I want” song – a song that tells us what we are looking for, what the stakes are, what’s stopping us.
It’s interesting to think about what an “I want” song does to a show, and to a life. In a show it drives the bus of the narrative. Once you’re on the bus, you pretty much know where you are going. The bus offers a lot, but it also limits. Once your identity is locked in an I want song about winning a football scholarship, it’s hard to see what else you might have sung about. Our dreams come from somewhere, surely innate personal taste accounts for some of it–the dull of tongue often aren’t chefs- but we can also assume that childhood influences both conscious and subconscious, are what defines what we want. It can be changed.
In life we sometimes get what we want, but often when change comes, we just get a new I want song. I’m sure I’m not alone in getting sick of the sound of my own chirping of wanting. I’d rather be the fake Wizard of Oz, handing out hearts to lovelorn animatronics, and explaining to young people the power of good shoes, etc, than to be one of Dorothy’s crew, all hungry for something they can describe in one word. Maybe it would take the pressure off our one top goal if we took on another. It feels like asking for a lot. If I want my art to be discovered, according to musical logic, I shouldn’t also desperately want to find my long lost sister. How to not get stuck on a bus? Ride two buses at once. Not possible in reality, but normal in the poetic. Which is where we are.
Anyway, I just felt like saying hello. The paperback of my new book, The Wonder Paradox, comes out March 5, so I’m intending to be writing here more often, mulling over ideas. The Wonder Paradox is made of clear writing and ideas but is also willing to start new thoughts, even if they are strange at first.
If you read this, let me know where you are in the world? Do you have an “I want” song?
Bye for now!
Jennifer